Imaging may be critical in many commercial settings. Users of imaging may include any range of professionals or consumers. As one example, medical doctors, technicians, and/or other individuals trained to acquire medical images may all employ imaging to make patient care decisions. Medical imaging may include radiography, computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), fluoroscopy, single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT), positron emission tomography (PET), scintigraphy, ultrasound, as well as specific techniques (e.g., echocardiography, mammography, intravascular ultrasound, and angiography).
By way of example, one application of medical imaging is the diagnosis and treatment of coronary artery disease, which may produce coronary lesions in the blood vessels providing blood to the heart, such as a stenosis (abnormal narrowing of a blood vessel). Patients suffering from coronary artery disease may experience a restriction of blood flow to the heart and resulting chest pain, referred to as chronic stable angina during physical exertion or unstable angina when the patient is at rest. A more severe manifestation of disease may lead to myocardial infarction, or heart attack.
Patients suffering from chest pain and/or exhibiting symptoms of coronary artery disease may be subjected to one or more noninvasive tests that may provide some indirect evidence relating to coronary lesions. For example, noninvasive tests may include electrocardiograms, biomarker evaluation from blood tests, treadmill tests, echocardiography, SPECT, and PET. Anatomic data may be obtained noninvasively using coronary computed tomographic angiography (cCTA). cCTA may be used for imaging of patients with chest pain. For example, cCTA may involve using CT technology to image the heart and the coronary arteries following an intravenous infusion of a contrast agent.
Although use of imaging may be pervasive, the image acquisition process still has limitations. For example, in the medical context, trade-offs may lie between capturing an image of a quality high enough to provide information to make a medical decision (e.g., a diagnosis), while at the same time, minimizing risk to a patient (e.g., from radiation exposure) and resources used for the image acquisition. Therefore, a desire may exist to identify or anticipate image acquisition parameters that may produce images of requisite quality, while limiting traditional drawbacks, e.g., radiation exposure and resource usage associated with quality imaging. In other words, a desire may exist for determining or obtaining optimized image acquisition parameters, for instance, prior to obtaining an image or scan.
The foregoing general description and the following detailed description are exemplary and explanatory only and are not restrictive of the disclosure.